Friday, August 01, 2014

As Gov. Chris Christie prepares to cap off his trip to New Hampshire tonight with a fundraiser at a minor-league baseball game, the Democratic National Committee has released a online video taking a swing at the Republican governor’s handling of New Jersey’s economy.

The clip is modeled after an old-time newsreel — the kind that would have been shown in movie houses when Babe Ruth ruled the baseball diamond in the 1920s.

It notes that under Christie — a possible candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 — New Jersey has among the highest property taxes and slowest job growth in the U.S.

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And the point is pretty simple: In order to guarantee her election, Hillary is going to have to energize the enthusiasm of three overlapping but not identical groups of voters:

Andy, didn't you say a couple weeks ago that quite simply nobody in the R field has any prayer of beating Hillary? If so, all she has to do is show up.

Don't worry, I'll still take that bet once she declares her candidacy. In the land of the blind, the one eyed woman can still be queen.

I'm only glad that she didn't wait till 2016 to start coming out with crap like this, but she's going to have to do a LOT of work to repair the damage that she's done among the Democratic base.** It's as if Nixon had run in 1968 after having trashed Eisenhower's handling of the Suez crisis and the Hungarian revolution, or if Henry Wallace had tried to get the Democratic nomination in 1948. Politically it just makes no sense.

**Read the comments in response to that Times story I mentioned above. They're not exactly gushing in their admiration for her critique of Obama. In particular, read the first comment under "Readers Picks", a comment which elicited the largest number of approvals.

I'm only glad that she didn't wait till 2016 to start coming out with crap like this, but she's going to have to do a LOT of work to repair the damage that she's done among the Democratic base.** It's as if Nixon had run in 1968 after having trashed Eisenhower's handling of the Suez crisis and the Hungarian revolution, or if Henry Wallace had tried to get the Democratic nomination in 1948. Politically it just makes no sense.

Of course it does. If things go badly in Iraq/Syria, it positions her better in the general election. If things go well, most likely no one remembers her comment, and she can run as a "realist" in the general. I mean, hawkish foreign policy appears to have never hurt Republicans. The only recent candidate hawkish FP has hurt has been HRC herself in 2008.

It's a pretty clear hedge and way to distance herself from the Obama admin. She wants to run as Bill's third term, not Obama's.

Obviously his suicide was sad, but I don't know that I ever laughed at anything Robin Williams ever said or did. If I did, it was no more than once or twice. I think I sort of laughed when he played Ronald Reagan, master behind the curtain, on SNL ... but only (as "genial" Reagan) when he gave that Girl Scout an award and said something like, "With [yadda, yadda] like that, I could use you up on Capital Hill."

Obviously his suicide was sad, but I don't know that I ever laughed at anything Robin Williams ever said or did.

You monster.

I think I laughed once, in the scene in Mrs. Doubtfire where Pierce Brosnan is choking at the restaurant and Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire races across the room to save Brosnan and clears one of the dinner tables like a Kentucky show horse.

I think I laughed once, in the scene in Mrs. Doubtfire where Pierce Brosnan is choking at the restaurant and Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire races across the room to save Brosnan and clears one of the dinner tables like a Kentucky show horse.

So, you're saying that "pro life" has limits, that it is referring to a specific stance on one specific issue and does not mean that one is universally against killing anyone for any reason? You don't say.

Actually, I think the pro-choice/anti-death penalty folks are far funnier.

As I said eons ago (and was pilloried for doing so), HRC won't protect Obama's legacy.

HRC is pretty on-board with all the domestic policy achievements (maybe with Dodd-Frank as an exception). They were all pretty much universal planks in the D platform in 2008.

If you mean in FP, O's legacy is drawdown in Iraq/Afghanistan, a policy of negotiation, and drone killings. I don't see how drawdown could be reversed really. I suppose a treaty with Iran could be abrogated, but that seems more dependent on events on the ground. I think drone killings are here to stay.

Edit:

Actually, I think the pro-choice/anti-death penalty folks are far funnier.

It's entirely consistent if you don't believe a fetus is alive. I'm also pro-choice on goiters.

Not sure I've ever seen any of Williams' comedies; closest would be The World According to Garp, which is the first thing I ever saw of his (I think I might've seen a couple of minutes of Mork & Mindy before that; didn't have a TV for most of the time I was in college or grad school). I don't really think of that as a comedy, though I guess it is, sort of.

Obviously his suicide was sad, but I don't know that I ever laughed at anything Robin Williams ever said or did. If I did, it was no more than once or twice. I think I sort of laughed when he played Ronald Reagan, master behind the curtain, on SNL ... but only (as "genial" Reagan) when he gave that Girl Scout an award and said something like, "With [yadda, yadda] like that, I could use you up on Capital Hill."

His impersonation of Phil Hartman impersonating Reagan was drop-dead brilliant in that skit.

I'm only glad that she didn't wait till 2016 to start coming out with crap like this, but she's going to have to do a LOT of work to repair the damage that she's done among the Democratic base.** It's as if Nixon had run in 1968 after having trashed Eisenhower's handling of the Suez crisis and the Hungarian revolution, or if Henry Wallace had tried to get the Democratic nomination in 1948. Politically it just makes no sense.

Of course it does. If things go badly in Iraq/Syria, it positions her better in the general election. If things go well, most likely no one remembers her comment, and she can run as a "realist" in the general. I mean, hawkish foreign policy appears to have never hurt Republicans. The only recent candidate hawkish FP has hurt has been HRC herself in 2008.

Correct. And whose support in the form of get-out-the-vote energy will she be needing in 2016? By openly trashing the president she served under without any seeming complaint, she's not only depressing the turnout among non-hawks, she's risking the turnoff of those Obama loyalists whose support of her this time is at least partly seen as rewarding her loyalty to the team. She's now thrown a big monkey wrench into that, and it's purely self-inflicted.

It's a pretty clear hedge and way to distance herself from the Obama admin. She wants to run as Bill's third term, not Obama's.

You don't have to run as Obama's third term in order to treat the president you served under with a modicum of loyalty. If she thinks that this isn't going to reverberate negatively among Obama's core supporters, she's crazy.

Considering that the study was investigating the effectiveness on low birth weight children, splitting them into cohorts seems like a good decision to gauge impact. Calling that "cherry-picking" is being anti-science.

Everyone in the study was a low birth weight child. They simply subdivided them further because the overall data didn't show what they had hoped. To be sure, splitting up a sample population into subgroups is a reasonable approach for deciding what to study. If you do a drug trial and don't find a benefit, but then look closer and see that blacks seemed to see a health benefit but whites didn't, it's reasonable to hypothesize that the drug may be beneficial to blacks and design a new study to test that hypothesis. What's not reasonable is to declare based on the first study that the drug benefits blacks, because you can always subdivide the population in different ways ex post facto to find a subgroup that showed a benefit.

Yes, I do "delusionally believe" that you can find 11 billion dollars a year. It's not even hard.

Why not seven dollars and fifty-three cents, as long as you're making up numbers? (That might be a reasonable estimate for simply extending Head Start, but that's not what I said, as you'd see if you didn't clip what I wrote. What I was referring to was the cost of scaling up the tiny programs that actually did show some results, like Perry or Abecedarian. They spent significantly more per student than Head Start.)

And, of course, dozens of studies have found lifelong benefits.

Or, well, not. But even if they had, plenty of studies don't. You can't cite only the studies whose findings you like.

Obviously his suicide was sad, but I don't know that I ever laughed at anything Robin Williams ever said or did.

I recall laughing at his super-dooper Popeye "twister punch", but then again I was ten years old at the time.

Yeah, he was one of the most overrated comedian/actors of my lifetime, and it's debatable how much of his endless shtick was truly shtick and how much of it was just his natural crazy manic personality.

And the point is pretty simple: In order to guarantee her election, Hillary is going to have to energize the enthusiasm of three overlapping but not identical groups of voters:

She doesn't need to energize anything, let alone enthusiasm. She needs to get votes. Even assuming that what she said was pure political calculation, the only relevant question is whether there are more interventionists¹ in the middle of the spectrum who think Obama can't be trusted on foreign policy than there are isolationists on the left that will stay home because she said something vaguely hawkish.

¹I'm using the term advisedly, since she didn't propose anything specific in the way of intervention. All she did was sound a bit more assertive than Obama.

If she thinks that this isn't going to reverberate negatively among Obama's core supporters, she's crazy.

Aside from Blacks who's left? (pun intended)

The "left" has long since given up on the idea that he's the "one" HRC distancing herself from him on Foreign policy grounds is just gonna draw a shrug from them.
Women/Feminists?
Hispanics? They didn't vote FOR Obama, they voted against the GOP.

I would be aghast if this happens. You're far more an inside than I, but I don't see the "should" you obviously do.

Understand that the Goldberg interview wasn't a one-off. Hillary will continue taking pot-shots at Obama as needed and not even domestic policy will be sacrosanct. Meanwhile, Biden has been his loyal and quite useful Vice President. (It's worth repeating that Uncle Joe was a world-class campaigner throughout 2012.)

I'm not aware of any long term studies that don't show significant reduction in incarcerations, substance abuse, etc. that tested for them.

Some fail to show improvements in test scores in subsequent years, but test scores are not all of the benefits of the program. Btw: OKC found that giving teachers more experience with better prepared children resulted in sustaining test score gains.

Why not seven dollars and fifty-three cents, as long as you're making up numbers? (That might be a reasonable estimate for simply extending Head Start, but that's not what I said, as you'd see if you didn't clip what I wrote. What I was referring to was the cost of scaling up the tiny programs that actually did show some results, like Perry or Abecedarian. They spent significantly more per student than Head Start.)

That's the cost for taking OK/GA's model national. OK meets 8/9 standards for "high quality" as established in Perry (I think?). 11 Billion is pretty easy to do, we just confiscate the earnings of all libertarians at gunpoint. Seems like the fairest way to raise money for any program.

Everyone in the study was a low birth weight child. They simply subdivided them further because the overall data didn't show what they had hoped. To be sure, splitting up a sample population into subgroups is a reasonable approach for deciding what to study. If you do a drug trial and don't find a benefit, but then look closer and see that blacks seemed to see a health benefit but whites didn't, it's reasonable to hypothesize that the drug may be beneficial to blacks and design a new study to test that hypothesis. What's not reasonable is to declare based on the first study that the drug benefits blacks, because you can always subdivide the population in different ways ex post facto to find a subgroup that showed a benefit.

Where's your evidence that they split the population ex post facto in search of correlations? That's a pretty serious charge against the ethics of researchers from someone who posts on bbtf while billing for their time.

Understand that the Goldberg interview wasn't a one-off. Hillary will continue taking pot-shots at Obama as needed and not even domestic policy will be sacrosanct. Meanwhile, Biden has been his loyal and quite useful Vice President. (It's worth repeating that Uncle Joe was a world-class campaigner throughout 2012.)

So -- shock!! -- she has ulterior motives. Revenge against Obama for taking what was "hers" in 2008. (*)

As noted, she's a vastly overrated politician and candidate. The idea that she's going to be coronated president in 2016 is pure looney tunes.

(*) Strip everything aside, and that's the most logical explanation for the Atlantic hit. She resents Obama terribly and can't hold it in. With recent stories coming out about Obama favoring Elizabeth Warren or even Biden to her, the claws and the broomstick came out. She can't help it. But I guess this is better than what she did as Obama was in the process of taking it from her in 2008, which was to basically spend a week coming up with more and more creative ways of calling him a n_____r.

And what does she gain? Seriously, how many voters are there in the category of "Leaning Republican, turned off by the Tea Party, but only willing to switch if the Democrat comes across more hawkish than Obama"?

Lots. You understand that the argument from incredulity, while one of your personal favorites, is a logical fallacy, right? (Of course, if your argument is that it couldn't help her in a Democratic primary, you might be right. But presumably she's aiming at a general election victory, not merely a primary victory.)

**Read the comments in response to that Times story I mentioned above. They're not exactly gushing in their admiration for her critique of Obama. In particular, read the first comment under "Readers Picks", a comment which elicited the largest number of approvals.

Yes, as the old saying goes: "As the New York Times readership goes, so goes the nation."

When you were a pre-teen the first year of Mork and Mindy was hysterical, the second year was totally unwatchable crap...

and checking out Wiki I'm shocked that the show was on for 4 years...

By the time it started, I was a couple of weeks into my sophomore year in college, so I wouldn't have been part of the target audience anyway, I guess. My main impression of the show was built on the fact that one of the reviewers ina punk zine I occasionally contributed to, the Columbus, Ohio-based The Offense (later The Offense Newsletter), was a major Pam Dawber obsessive.

Be that as it may, I'm sure you'll agree that being "pro choice" on the abortion issue and being against school vouchers is in no way incongruent.

There's no incongruity in being pro-abortion and anti-voucher, I guess. There's some dissonance, but they're not actually incompatible. But there certainly is one between adopting the label "pro-choice" and being anti-choice on pretty much everything except sex.

I guess. My main impression of the show was built on the fact that one of the reviewers ina punk zine I occasionally contributed to, the Columbus, Ohio-based The Offense (later The Offense Newsletter), was a major Pam Dawber obsessive.

She was kind of generically cute in a harmless non-entity kind of way, but could have been a card board cutout in most of her roles, no onstage'/ onscreen "presence" if you know what I mean, I find it difficult to believe that she'd be the target of anyone's obsession (but to each his own I suppose)

Williams' output was vast. I'm pretty sure that if you checked it all, you'd find a few things that you liked. Thinking back, that's how I think I'd feel about it when I get a chance to look. Even if a lot of stuff was similar, he wasn't totally one-note.

But there certainly is one between adopting the label "pro-choice" and being anti-choice on pretty much everything except sex.

Philip K. Dick for me, by a vast margin. (I was really depressed when John Severin died, too, but the man was 90 years old.) I didn't know about it for at least a day; a friend of mine in Houston (I was in grad school in Tempe) saw the obit in, I think, the NY Times & called me to let me know, since she knew he was my favorite writer. I can still remember being in a state of something approaching shock. Hell, another friend of mine & I had been talking about him on the phone just the night before, not having any way of knowing in those pre-internet days that he'd been in a coma from a stroke for days.

I'd have been pretty bummed over Jack Kirby's death, too, but for years I had no idea it had happened, having been out of comics for something like 15 years by that time.

During a private meeting, President Obama reportedly called criticisms of his Syria policy "horsesh-t."

Hillary Clinton and a number of members of Congress have said Obama could have done more to help Syrian rebels, including giving them weapons. The Daily Beast reports that Obama responded to the bipartisan criticism, arguing the notion that providing weapons to rebels sooner would have helped Syria is complete "horsesh-t."

Williams' output was vast. I'm pretty sure that if you checked it all, you'd find a few things that you liked. Thinking back, that's how I think I'd feel about it when I get a chance to look. Even if a lot of stuff was similar, he wasn't totally one note.

I'm pretty sure I enjoyed Mork & Mindy back when I was a child. But post puberty, I really can't think of anything Williams did that got a genuine laugh out of me. It all just seemed so... schticky, even if it was really just an outgrowth of his mental illness.

That's a fair correction. Claiming that a tiny study that focused on low birth weight babies made a conclusive case for UNIVERSAL pre-K is rather... dishonest.

I didn't post that.

You posted the study. You claimed it made a case for universal pre-K, even though it did nothing of the sort. Not content to misrepresent the content of the links you posted, now you're lying about actually making the posts?

I'm pretty sure I enjoyed Mork & Mindy back when I was a child. But post puberty, I really can't think of anything Williams did that got a genuine laugh out of me. It all just seemed so... schticky, even if it was really just an outgrowth of his mental illness.

You'd see him, and he'd break into the schtick and ... there never seemed to be a joke in there. It actually made me uncomfortable watching from time to time, it was so unfunny.

As indicated above, I know him mainly from non-comic roles -- Garp, Awakenings, Fisher King, Bicentennial Man, One-Hour Photo & (just a couple of months ago) Final Cut. That might've been it; for no particular reason (other than the fact that I lean toward genre viewing), I seem to have missed the films most people appear to associate him with, like Good Will Hunting, Good Morning Vietnam, Patch Adams, Dead Poets' Society, Mrs. Doubtfire, etc.

Obviously, he wasn't an actor whose presence would make me watch a movie with no questions asked. To be honest, I'm not sure such a creature exists, though for me David Strathairn comes close. Or maybe (for, uh, entirely different reasons) Juno Temple.

He also guest-starred in what I'm pretty sure was the first episode of Homicide: Life on the Street that I ever saw, probably at least 20 years ago. Weird.

You posted the study. You claimed it made a case for universal pre-K, even though it did nothing of the sort. Not content to misrepresent the content of the links you posted, now you're lying about actually making the posts?

To be fair, I was actually the one who posted the study. He merely adopted that posted study as though it supported his argument.

Not to pile on or anything, but Good Will Hunting might be the most overrated movie in the history of cinema. The scene where Matt Damon finally breaks out crying to Williams is about as cringe-inducing as it gets. Dead Poets Society is kind of in that vein.

You posted the study. You claimed it made a case for universal pre-K, even though it did nothing of the sort. Not content to misrepresent the content of the links you posted, now you're lying about actually making the posts?

David posted the study. I would not have posted it because low birth weight babies are a small subset of the population. I pointed out that even in the study that he posted, the researchers found a positive effect for one cohort.

Not to pile on or anything, but Good Will Hunting might be the most overrated movie in the history of cinema.

But there are sooooooo many contenders. Without checking IMDb or Wikipedia, I'm going to go out on a limb & say it might not even be the most overrated movie of whatever year it came out (as noted, I didn't see it).

To be fair, I was actually the one who posted the study. He merely adopted that posted study as though it supported his argument.

Conceded. His enthusiastic adoption of a study that didn't say what he thought it did was what threw me.

David posted the study. I would not have posted it because low birth weight babies are a small subset of the population. I pointed out that even in the study that he posted, the researchers found a positive effect for one cohort.

Your point was that I misrepresented the studies I posted. I did no such thing. I also did not misrepresent the study that David posted (unlike David, who accused the researchers of committing a very significant ethical misstep).

I also did not "adopt it enthusiastically." I merely pointed out that it found a positive effect, despite David citing it as evidence that some studies found no effect. If you want to quibble with people misrepresenting studies, start there.

The studies that I "adopt enthusiastically" are the OK studies with follow-ups, the Perry study, the Abbott Pre-School study, and the Chicago pre-school study.

The OK study I think is most relevant because it's the proposed model for the rest of the country. It finds large gains in test scores for pre-K, with the initial wave of students not holding onto those gains by grade 3. However, the second year of students retained improved test scores in grade 3, with anecdotal evidence presented that teachers had to adjust to better prepared students. I think these studies, combined with the longitudinal studies like Perry and Abbott, show that intervention has great results for at-risk kids, and somewhat likely to show results with all children, although that is more mixed.

I think that universal makes sense because if you implement it as a means-tested program, you create another poverty trap and make the eventual program more likely to be subjected to budget cuts. Furthermore, most middle to upper class parents already pay for pre-k, so extending universal early childhood education by one year makes more sense than implementing a more limited program. While the benefits are not 100% as clear-cut for wealthier children, it would prevent disruption and replicate a program most already use.

Best Robin Williams film ever IMO is Death to Smoochy. It's almost like he was playing himself.

RAINBOW ####### RANDOLPH

Mickey Mantle and Stanley Kubrick died on the same day, IIRC.

Huh, I didn't remember that, and Kubrick has my vote as the greatest director of the 2nd half of the 20th century. I remember Mantle's death fairly clearly too, listening to discussions on the radio in the lab.

And what does she gain? Seriously, how many voters are there in the category of "Leaning Republican, turned off by the Tea Party, but only willing to switch if the Democrat comes across more hawkish than Obama"?

Lots. You understand that the argument from incredulity, while one of your personal favorites, is a logical fallacy, right? (Of course, if your argument is that it couldn't help her in a Democratic primary, you might be right. But presumably she's aiming at a general election victory, not merely a primary victory.)

Well, duh. But again, how many general election voters are looking for anti-Republican candidates who apparently (for now, anyway) have little quarrel with the basic tenets of the Republican worldview? By positioning herself this way, she's simply counting on independents to be so repulsed by the Republican candidate that she can basically afford to ignore, or even alienate, a huge part of her own party's base.

Given the state of today's GOP field, she may well be right. But it's still a stupid move, because it was so unnecessary.

**Read the comments in response to that Times story I mentioned above. They're not exactly gushing in their admiration for her critique of Obama. In particular, read the first comment under "Readers Picks", a comment which elicited the largest number of approvals.

Yes, as the old saying goes: "As the New York Times readership goes, so goes the nation."

The truth is that the NYT's comments section is usually quite reflective of the dominant wing of the Democratic base. Treating that base as so many Sister Souljahs isn't really that brilliant a strategy. It reeks more of Dick Morris than anything else.

Oh, and BTW, how many previously vocal anti-Hillary people here would now consider voting for her after this Atlantic interview? Jason, how many of your NR buddies are going to choose her over any of the current GOP candidates? David, how many of your libertarian friends would vote for her over Rand Paul as a result of what she said? Ray, what about you? If there's a single even semi-major group of voters who've suddenly decided to back her after that interview, I've yet to see any evidence of it.

I think that universal makes sense because if you implement it as a means-tested program, you create another poverty trap and make the eventual program more likely to be subjected to budget cuts. Furthermore, most middle to upper class parents already pay for pre-k, so extending universal early childhood education by one year makes more sense than implementing a more limited program. While the benefits are not 100% as clear-cut for wealthier children, it would prevent disruption and replicate a program most already use.

Middle and upper middle class parents generally wouldn't use it anyway, unless it was seamlessly implemented as an appendage to local public schools that they're already using. Anything else and it'd wind up stigmatized as just another program for poors/minorities, which means those parents would avoid it like the plague.

I remember being struck when I watched it that he was actually able to keep himself subdued long enough to actually act in a dramatic role.

Just popped by this thread, as there seemed to be no other place to discuss Williams' passing (otherwise would not be here in the slightest). It surprises me that (besides gef in #2264 and a few others) many of you have little familiarity with his dramatic work. Yes, something like Patch Adams or Mrs. Doubtfire is fairly grating, but there was much, much more to him as an actor. A number of his roles fall in the middle of the spectrum (Dead Poets' Society, Good Will Hunting, to some extent Good Morning Vietnam and The Birdcage, which are all well-regarded movies and all movies I really enjoy), but he also had a strand of work where he played much, much darker. Insomnia, World's Greatest Dad, and One Hour Photo are all excellent films where he harnesses his comedic chops in the direction of loneliness. Each of those films relies entirely on his ability to both relate positively to the audience, while also disappearing deeply into his characters' own head. Both of his most notable roles (to me) on television (his Law and Order: SVU guest spot and his Homicide: Life on the Street guest spot) also fit neatly in that area. I would definitely recommend you check out one or more of these films (particularly Insomnia or One Hour Photo if you like darker thrillers) and see the other side of his grin as an actor.

A filmmaker who did well to bring out Williams' manic energy in a positive vein, btw, was Terry Gilliam: both Williams' brief role in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Fisher King have his trademark comic mugging, but in service to a more complete whole. I know people who dislike those movies, but I'm not one of them.

It is very meaningful for me to see critical websites (like The AV Club or The Dissolve), where Williams has traditionally been a punchline, open up and celebrate his career, but also his lesser-known movies. Even among the film literati, Williams' was respected, but often more for his less comedic roles, and I would certainly recommend several. :)

Middle and upper middle class parents generally wouldn't use it anyway, unless it was seamlessly implemented as an appendage to local public schools that they're already using. Anything else and it'd wind up stigmatized as just another program for poors/minorities, which means those parents would avoid it like the plague.

The OK/GA examples tend to show the opposite. But yes, in general, if you implement a program badly enough, it will have low uptake.

The truth is that the NYT's comments section is usually quite reflective of the dominant wing of the Democratic base.

Uh huh. Whatever you say.

Since obviously you know so much about both the nature of those comments and the beliefs of the Democratic base, perhaps due to inside information from Al Frum or Dick Morris, why don't you spell out the ways in which their beliefs diverge? Maybe I'm missing somehing, but which of these groups is in favor of a hawkish foreign policy?

JERRY: So, when do I get my dinner?
KRAMER: There's no dinner. The bet's off. I'm not gonna do it.
JERRY: Yes. I know you're not gonna do it. That's why I bet.
KRAMER: There's no bet if I'm not doing it.
JERRY: That's the bet! That you're not doing it!
KRAMER: Yeah, well, I could do it. I don't want to do it.
JERRY: We didn't bet on if you wanted to. We bet on if it would be done.
KRAMER: And it could be done.
JERRY: Well, of course it could be done! Anything could be done! But it only is done if it's done. Show me the levels! The bet is the levels.
KRAMER: But I don't want the levels!
JERRY: That's the bet!

BTW, I am really not comfortable with the police department of Ferguson, Missouri having the capability to roll out like it's the ####### Battle of Stalingrad. More technology is not always a good thing.

Hell, gun rights people should agree with this as well. Your right to bear arms ain't gonna mean much if the local small-town police department can nuke you.

There's no incongruity in being pro-abortion and anti-voucher, I guess. There's some dissonance, but they're not actually incompatible. But there certainly is one between adopting the label "pro-choice" and being anti-choice on pretty much everything except sex.

Indeed, which was the point I was making. Misirlou cooked up the abortion angle, which I hadn't mentioned.

***

Williams' output was vast. I'm pretty sure that if you checked it all, you'd find a few things that you liked. Thinking back, that's how I think I'd feel about it when I get a chance to look. Even if a lot of stuff was similar, he wasn't totally one-note.

Agreed. Dead Poets Society; Good Will Hunting; Good Morning, Vietnam; Awakenings — Williams had some great/enjoyable performances on his résumé. It's interesting that, for a guy known for being a comedian through and through, his non-comedic roles seem to be his most memorable.

Celebrity(ish) deaths I have cared about, that I can remember right now, in order of sadness:

Short list for me. Only two recent ones that come to mind are Philip Seymour Hoffman and Steve Jobs.

Early on Robin Williams was funny, then his frantic stream of consciousness shtick did seem to get old...

Jim Carrey's career kind of reminds of Williams, where his comedy is super shticky and was very popular for a short time and got old really fast, but since then has some good but inconsistent success in dramatic roles. He's also had a history depression, but as others have said, that seems to be the standard with comedians.

Jim Carrey's career kind of reminds of Williams, where his comedy is super shticky and was very popular for a short time and got old really fast, but since then has some good but inconsistent success in dramatic roles. He's also had a history depression, but as others have said, that seems to be the standard with comedians.

Was Carrey bloody awful in The Majestic -- I saw it for the first time last week -- or was the script to blame?

one of the oddest musical factoids I recall ever learning about, Freddy Mercury's real name was Farrokh Bulsara and he was born in Zanzibar, his family wasn't originally from Zanzibar, they were Zoroastrians from India...